Margaret Morganroth Gullette

Margaret Morganroth Gullette

Margaret Morganroth Gullette is a cultural critic and prize-winning writer of nonfiction, an internationally known age critic, essayist, and activist. Her latest book, Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in America (2011), won a 2012 Eric Hoffer Book Award. Aged by Culture (2004) was chosen as a “Noteworthy Book of the Year” by the Christian Science Monitor. Declining to Decline (1997) won the Emily Toth Award as the best feminist book on American popular culture.

Margaret’s focus on the midlife (in Safe at Last in the Middle Years and Declining to Decline) has expanded into the field of Age Studies, now institutionalized in two international networks of age scholars called NANAS and ENAS. Age, studied from childhood on, can be as powerful as studies of gender or race, by empowering people to challenge decline culture and join an anti-ageist movement.

Margaret’s essays, one the winner of the Daniel Singer Millennium Prize, are frequently cited as notable in Best American Essays. She has published in the N.Y. Times, Ms., Al Jazeera, Guardian, Nation, Boston Globe, American Scholar, American Prospect, womensenews.org; many literary quarterlies; and such journals as Feminist Studies, Representations, Journal of the History of Sexuality. Her work is cited by scholars and journalists and used in courses. A recipient of NEH, ACLS, and Bunting fellowships, she is a member of PEN-America. In Nicaragua, her work has helped hundreds of adults to become literate and graduate from high school.

Current Projects

Margaret is developing the interdisciplinary field of age studies through lectures and publications, and is completing a new book to be called How Not To Shoot Old People. She is also writing a family political memoir about becoming an activist in Nicaragua.